Rather said good reporting was in decline, and with the “new Internet,” “traditional journalism” remains “so susceptible to manipulation, deception, and distraction that it allows lies to get started and then spread like mildew in a damp basement.”

Rather and Schultz were criticizing conservative new media outlets like Breitbart News for writing stories about President Barack Obama’s nominee for Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s refusal to disclose financial documents in his confirmation hearings.

Rather sorrowfully recounted his glory days, when the American mainstream media “was the gold standard for the world.” If a reporter received false information from a source, he claimed, “he found it out because he wore out shoe leather, he made telephone calls, his organization had other reporters who would check it out, and they’ve exposed the lie.”

The last time Dan Rather wore out his shoe leather, he was chasing after Richard Nixon. The American media has not been the gold standard for the world since the country was on the gold standard. It was just big. Now it’s getting smaller.

The entire media has become a classier version of BuzzFeed combining such vital topics as amusing internet videos, celebrity mishaps and left-wing think-tank talking points into bland stories.

Occasionally someone in the media will write an actual in-depth story, a prestige piece that reminds you of what the media used to be even twenty years ago. But these stories will invariably be on non-political issues or political issues that the left doesn’t really care about because they’re overseas. The rest of the time even the prestige pieces are just a collection of talking points with biographical backing.

The media killed its own credibility when it went from inserting bias into legitimate coverage to turning its bias into the coverage. Like the Boston Globe cover up top, they’re no longer pretending. There is no difference between DailyKos, Think Progress and the Boston Globe.

And who helped make that happen? Dan Rather, who exists as a reminder of a time when a media figure would actually be fired for telling a lie.